


Westbound on the A5

by Vaysh



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Gen, Historical References, Missing Scene, one good deed begets another
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:27:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28108536
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaysh/pseuds/Vaysh
Summary: Andy drives back to Goussainville through the night.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23





	Westbound on the A5

**Author's Note:**

> The pharmacy where Andy meets Celeste was located in a city in Val d'Argent, according to this article about [the Old Guard filming locations](https://www.atlasofwonders.com/2020/07/the-old-guard-house-city-filming-locations.html). Val d'Argent is a two and a half hour ride from Goussainville. I was wondering what went through Andy's mind on the long drive back.
> 
> Written for [The Old Guard Holiday Calendar](https://the-old-guard.dreamwidth.org/tag/%21holiday+calendar) 2020.

  


The asphalt is black; the land on both sides of the autoroute lies silent in dark hues of grey. There is no moon tonight. The centre strip sets the rhythm of this drive: white, continuously interrupted, a Morse code without any meaning Andy can see.

She's westbound on the A5, back from Val d'Argent to their hide-out in the old church of Goussainville. It is long after midnight, still pitch-dark but the morning is catching up with her. In the rear view mirror Andy can already see a shimmer of the approaching dawn.

She'll be back in Goussainville in less than an hour but she needs the drive. It's why she didn't go into the new town, where she certainly would have found a _pharmacie_ open all night. No, she needed the drive, she needed those hours with nothing but the black asphalt, and the occasional lights dotting the sleeping land. She needed time to adjust, to let herself believe it, to let it sink in. She's no longer immortal. No longer a Goddess. No longer someone whose future stretches before her endlessly, just like her past. 

Well, she'd given up thinking of herself as a Goddess a millennium ago.

But it had been hard; it had taken her years and years. And this is what Nicolo and Yusuf understand (and times like this, she calls them by their old names in her mind), but Booker doesn't. He gets religion but he doesn't get the old Gods who mingled among humans upon the earth. 

Alexander (Alexander the Great they still call him, and he'd be so pleased) was the son of a mortal man and a Goddess, or of a mortal woman and a God, depending on whom you ask. Andy had never asked, she never got a chance. She met Alexander in battle, and you don't ask your enemy questions with your labrys swinging above his head. Fighting against him and his armies had been one of the greatest honours of her life. And it didn't matter what legends surrounded Alexander's birth. What mattered was: He was a God. 

Andy cannot remember her mother's face or name. But she can still smell the smoke of burning lime-tree bark. She can still feel the bark braids slipping through her fingers, over and over, in ritual. She was born the daughter of an Enaree, a Scythian diviner. Her people didn't hold much with legends of Gods fucking mortals whether they wanted to or not. But they believed in bonds that are difficult to explain today: bonds between human and horse, between tribe and tree. Her people believed that Andy was a Goddess, after her first couple of deaths on the battlefield. It wasn't insanity. It wasn't hubris. She did not die, and being a Goddess was the most likely explanation her world had to offer for her immortality. 

She'd been so young then – in Scythia, before everything. Young, Andy thinks, like Nile.

The centre strip keeps running its code – long, long, short, long – when a rest stop is coming up. _Aire de Service_ , says the sign on the side of the road. Andy turns off the autoroute to get a bottle of water and shake out her legs.

There's a restaurant, lit brightly in the night, and a gas station with a _supermarché_. When Andy comes out of the store, she notices a man standing at the entrance of the restaurant, half-hidden in the shadows. At first she thinks he's a mugger, doing a particularly bad job. Then a couple leaves the restaurant, and the man approaches them. 

Andy sets the water bottle on the roof of her car, ready to intervene, should the man really go for a robbery. But he is hesitant, polite, he asks the couple for a ride to Paris. A hitchhiker, an _auto stoppeur_. Now, that is something you don't see much today. Too dangerous.

The couple moves on quickly without a word, not even a No. They walk past the man as if he were not standing plainly visible in the lights. Hitchhiking has come out of fashion because, yes, it's too dangerous, and because nobody offers a stranger a seat in their car anymore. 

Not a hundred metres North from here, the stones of an old _Via Romana_ are hiding underneath the fields. Andy remembers riding on it towards Paris, she remembers travelling on it in the opposite direction, in a coach on route to Strasbourg. 

_... you help someone up when they fall._

She touches her right shoulder and traces the outlines of the patch underneath her coat. It doesn't hurt. She can still feel the woman's fingers on her skin, applying disinfectant, making sure the sterile strips are in place. Such unexpected kindness from a stranger. 

Andromache of Scythia has lived too long to be naive about such acts of kindness. They're rare. The dark-haired clerk back in the _pharmacie_ is an exception – to take such a risk, to even care. But –

"Hey!" Andy turns to the man who's still standing before the restaurant. "I'm going to Paris. Need a ride?"

  


**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Westbound on the A5](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29318865) by [semperfiona_podfic (semperfiona)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/semperfiona/pseuds/semperfiona_podfic)




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